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In Russia they started blocking websites with the same reasons (+ a "methods of committing suicide" category to supposedly prevent kids from killing themselves). Then, once they had the infrastructure in place and more or less working they added a bunch of other stuff, such as:- down-with-the-government posts- pirated content

The blocked site list is managed by incredibly dumb people. That included blocking an Everquest wiki article on magic potions (supposedly it describes drugs) and Github for a single repository containing a list of suicide methods.The blocking of Github was particularly nasty because Github is HTTPS-only (so it's impossible to block a specific page) and the agency basically said they don't give a shit if this is interfering with legitimate business - if you need Github so much, write Github and demand them to should honor takedown requests by the Russian government.

Twitter is useful for rapidly searching for news: accidents, network issues at a local ISP, realtime coverage of press conferences, that sort of thing. Also, many companies and websites have their own Twitter accounts and post news there - something like RSS replacement which is realtime and quick to browse (because messages are limited).

"Modern" solutions like syncing only a handful of songs you expect to listen or streaming everything is much more difficult than carrying a complete audio library with you.My current music library is something like 120 gigs. That includes* regular 256-320kb/s MP3 albums* FLAC albums* soundtracks from games* "bonus" stuff like remixes, instrumentals* random compilations grouped into hierarchical folders* stuff shared by friends which is yet to be listened to be deleted or saved* "souvenir" CDs bought from obscure street bands without proper tags

The only players which can keep my complete music libraries are HDD-based. And the only way I can keep my audio organized is to keep it in folders rather than a single list with 11000+ tracks, 500+ artists, 1000+ albums.The only portable player capable of carrying all my library was an iPod Classic. I even wrote a script to replicate the folder-based organization into hierarchical lists in iTunes. Being able to instantly play a song you haven't heard in many years, or being able to choose a song which matches you mood is really awesome. Having multiple days of battery life is also kind of impressive.The only thing wrong with iPod Classic 6G was its audio quality. It seems Apple's vision was for Classic at that time was to be a video player capable of carrying TV shows (and plugging into a TV if necessary), that's why filling it with music made the library completely unmanageable.

RFID in passports requires to enter some passport fields (like last name, date of birth, passport number etc.) in order to be unlocked. In order to "steal" RFID data, you need to open it and read data from the photo page.

For home, printers are indeed used much less than 10-15 years ago.Photos can be demonstrated on a tablet or TV, short documents and books can be read on a tablet. Printing emails is no longer the only option of keeping them safe. Maps can be used on a phone instead of being printed.

But if you need a formal or signed document, printers are still heavily used. I don't know how it's in the US, but in some countries you need stuff like- passport copies for opening bank accounts, car registration, and so on- offline bank payments (required as proof of payment by many government organizations here)- visa application forms and supporting documents - can be over a hundred pages in total when preparing documents for the whole family.This stuff is often difficult to get right the first time, so having a printer at home is much less stressful than driving to a print shop several times to get everything right.

Now in corporate/education, you may also need printed and signed confirmations for other stuff (especially when required by law). One more thing for which printers are better than tablets is handouts - making notes and diagrams with a pen is much more effective than fingerpainting on a tablet/touchpad or typing text on a laptop.

And let's not forget that printed documents never run out of batteries and have to be seriously damaged to be unusable. If you have a printed boarding pass, it's much less likely to fail.

HP's consumer and enterprise laptops are entirely different and seem to be designed by different companies.The Envy, Pavilion, "Essentials" lines may appear like chinese-designed OEM machines in an HP-styles package.The Pro*, Elite* series are very different. They have- custom BIOS with tons of options (unlike the consumer versions with almost no options and a text-based interface like you see in cheap OEM motherboards)- much better touchpads with really nice buttons. The consumer versions often have weird stuff like virtual buttons, buttons with a loud "click" and non-existing travel. While enterprise laptops have buttons with some travel distance and a smooth click. I can't describe it but they do have a very nice feel, somewhat closer to keyboards.- better components. Almost every corporate laptop has Intel networking chips (or at least Broadcom). The cases don't flex as much as consumer versions.- the Windows 8 era machines include Windows 7 AND 8 installation disks - choose whatever you like. And proper, not "single-language reduced crap with tons of Symantec/McAfee/BonziBuddy bullshit" Windows editions.- 3-year warranty. Not even Apple offers that kind of support.

I've tried using MS-only products for about a year before surrendering and switching back to Google.Bing, Outlook.com, Windows 8.1/Windows Phone 8, Office 2013, all that sorts of stuff. Did not work out, and the biggest complaints about IE are:1) Website compatibility. For some reason IE 11 chooses legacy mode for many modern sites like endomondo.com etc. which disables features and breaks stuff. Additionally, MS tried to force developers to stop using IE versions when determining supported features, which broke browser detection on many sites, including Google, banking sites etc. Basically they told "sorry, we don't understand your browser type" and gave an HTML-only interface or even no access at all. This may be a webmaster problem, but MS should have at least provided an option to enable user-agent spoofing by default. Now you have to press F12 every time you open the same website because IE cannot remember previous compatibility settings. The only option is to force "compatibility mode" for sites which is IE6 quirks emulation - totally stupid.2) Addons - IE does not support lightweight addons like Chrome or Firefox. Addons are DLLs which require browser restarts, can cause crashes and generally are developed by unknown companies. Chrome and Firefox provide tons of simple extensions like scrobbling plugins, stopping of Youtube autoplay etc. which are unavailable for IE. And most plugins are in the form of Javascript which means they could be audited.Plugin development for IE is much more difficult than other browsers, period. This means many small, simple (but niche) addons will never be done because you have to learn a lot in order to create even a simplest plugin.Also, IE's search feature is terrible compared to Firefox/Chrome/Opera. No keywords for search engines, no option for adding search engines besides http://www.iegallery.com/ (does not have search plugins for all websites).3) Privacy - for some reason Chrome is considered to be worse than IE. However unlike Chrome or Firefox IE has non-existing cookie management. In Chrome or Firefox I can only enable cookies for a pre-approved site list, while IE's only option is to clear all cookies.4) Features - for many features IE hasn't changed much since IE4. Bookmarks are still stored as *.url files (no duplicates, no sorting, no support for characters like *,/,:). No spellcheck. Bookmark sync only works with Windows 8.5) Stability - even though IE11 is faster and more stable than IE7/8, it still locks up more frequently than Chrome (but uses less RAM).6) Updates - IE is terribly slow to update (once every 2-3 years???). And still updates require a system restart!

The only noticeable improvement between IE11 and IE7 is with speed, rendering and standards support. This may be good enough to make IE bearable on public or company-owned computers, but is not sufficient to switch Firefox/Chrome users back to IE.

Well, I did in fact visit Shanghai and stayed in a (probably) expensive hotel. While google.hk worked OK, other services like Youtube and Twitter were still blockedAnd the same situation was in the office I was visiting - US company, but almost no visitors (even the receptionist didn't speak English).

Google was not blocked in China, but rather not allowed to do business there. Last time I've been to China, Google still worked, but instead of google.cn it opened google.hk. They have pretty extensive Google Maps for China, with local services like traffic, as well as other services.The only thing which doesn't work is Youtube.

The encryption password becomes your lock screen PIN and there is no way to change it.

Wrong, the encryption password has to be entered when booting the phone only. It's even different screen (ugly Android 1.6-style buttons painted black).I have a device with corporate policies enforced and have 3 codes to enter:- Encryption password- SIM PIN- Lock PIN.When device becomes locked after inactivity, I only need to use the lock PIN.

I think one of the most useful things is reading NXP Mifare and similar contactless tickets. It's a very real and valid use for NFC, since a lot of these tickets do not provide any way of getting the number of remaining rides besides using a ticket checking machine.

Well, this actually makes sense. Magnetic media degrades over time, CDs suffer from bit rot, vynil records are easily dameged, HDDs fail, id3 tags are corrupted (Windows Media Player does that). Formats change over time - for example movies purchased 10 years ago are in DVD quality, which doesn't look good in big TVs; and high-quality 1080p torrents consume less space.And just at old iTunes purchases - they are poorer quality and have DRM.Now, renting music is not much worse than maintaining a record collection, and for the price of one album per month you get unlimited access to all songs. Sounds like a great bargain to me if you download at least one new album per month. And in 5-10 years your library will probably get upgraded to FLAC quality.If you are "lucky" to work in an open space environment, you need A LOT of music to compensate the noise. Listening to the same music over and over is even worse than listening to loud sales calls, and radio-style services or unlimited libraries really help to keep your sanity.The only downside I see is the possibility of provider going bankrupt or shutting down the music service.

X is terrible when working over non-local networks (VPN, offsite servers and so on). Once you get any sort of network latency, windows start drawing incredibly slowly, it seems every X drawing call is done synchronously and windows with many buttons and text labels may take tens of seconds to draw.It's so bad that our team has to use VNC server on every site and use it for any X applications. Even though VNC is supposed to be less efficient, it doesn't suffer as much from network latency.